The Mermaid | Page 9

looks forth upon her future; and as she, with nicety of preference,
selects the sort of lover she will have, so he selected the sort of
greatness which should befall his son. The stuff of this vision was, as
must always be, of such sort as had entered his mind in the course of
his limited experience. His grandfather had been an Englishman, and it
was known that one of the sons had been a notable physician in the city
of London: Caius must become a notable physician. His newspaper told
him of honours taken at the University of Montreal by young men of
the medical school; therefore, Caius was to study and take honours. It
was nothing to him that his neighbours did not send their sons so far
afield; he came of educated stock himself. The future of Caius was
prearranged, and Caius did not gainsay the arrangement.
That autumn the lad went away from home to a city which is, without

doubt, a very beautiful city, and joined the ranks of students in a
medical school which for size and thorough work is not to be despised.
He was not slow to drink in the new ideas which a first introduction to
modern science, and a new view of the relations of most things,
brought to his mind.
In the first years Caius came home for his summer vacations, and
helped his father upon the farm. The old man had money, but he had no
habit of spending it, and expenditure, like economy, is a practice to be
acquired. When Caius came the third time for the long summer holiday,
something happened.
He did not now often walk in the direction of the Day farm; there was
no necessity to take him there, only sentiment. He was by this time
ashamed of the emblazonment of his poetic effort upon the cliff. He
was not ashamed of the sentiment which had prompted it, but he was
ashamed of its exhibition. He still thought tenderly of the little child
that was lost, and once in a long while he visited the place where his
tablet was, as he would have visited a grave.
One summer evening he sauntered through the wood and down the road
by the sea on this errand. Before going to the shore, he stopped at the
cottage where the old labourer, Morrison, lived.
There was something to gossip about, for Day's wife had been sent
from the asylum as cured, and her husband had been permitted to take
her home again on condition that no young or weak person should
remain in the house with her. He had sent his two remaining children to
be brought up by a relative in the West. People said he could get more
work out of his wife than out of the children, and, furthermore, it saved
his having to pay for her board elsewhere. The woman had been at
home almost a twelvemonth, and Caius had some natural interest in
questioning Morrison as to her welfare and general demeanour. The
strange gaunt creature had for his imagination very much the
fascination that a ghost would have had. We care to hear all about a
ghost, however trivial the details may be, but we desire no personal
contact. Caius had no wish to meet this woman, for whom he felt
repulsion, but he would have been interested to hear Neddy Morrison

describe her least action, for Neddy was almost the only person who
had constant access to her house.
Morrison, however, had very little to tell about Mrs. Day. She had
come home, and was living very much as she had lived before. The
absence of her children did not appear to make great difference in her
dreary life. The old labourer could not say that her husband treated her
kindly or unkindly. He was not willing to affirm that she was glad to be
out of the asylum, or that she was sorry. To the old man's imagination
Mrs. Day was not an interesting object; his interest had always been
centred upon the children. It was of them he talked chiefly now, telling
of letters that their father had received from them, and of the art by
which he, Morrison, had sometimes contrived to make the taciturn Day
show him their contents. The interest of passive benevolence which the
young medical student gave to Morrison's account of these children,
who had grown quite beyond the age when children are pretty and
interesting, would soon have been exhausted had the account been long;
but it happened that the old man had a more startling communication to
make, which cut short his gossip about his master's family.
He had been standing so far at the door of his little wooden house. His